Instead, he has a warm and appealing speaking style, more than 10 years service as a governor of Arkansas and, as a Baptist minister, ties to religious and social conservatives that other campaigns can only envy.

He also is one of the few people running from either party who is frequently funny. On purpose.

At one of his speeches at a school here the other day, a cell phone began to ring and ring in the purse of a woman sitting in the front row. She groped for it, she fumbled for it, but it continued to ring and ring.

“If that is Dick Cheney asking to me to go on a duck hunt,” Huckabee said, “I am not here.”

His long, caterpillar eyebrows bounced. Everybody laughed.

Though Huckabee is easygoing on the stump — “I am a conservative and I am not mad at everybody,” he likes to say — his message is still one of urgency. It is urgent for people to get to Ames and vote for him. He will buy them a ticket and stuff them in a car, if he has to. But they must keep him in the race.

“Saturday you’ve got a chance not just to make a statement in Iowa, but to the whole world; the whole world will be watching,” he said to the crowd of about 50 people. (Fifty people is an OK crowd in Iowa on a rain-drenched weekday evening.) “We are going to surprise people. It didn’t cost you anything to get in here, but you have to sign up to come Saturday, otherwise you will be held hostage!”

People laughed again.

“I have a county chairman and his goal was 115 commitment cards [for Ames] and he got 150 and he is getting 150 more!” Huckabee said. “We’re going to cut his taxes!”

Laughter.

“You don’t show up and we’re not going to cut your taxes,” Huckabee said.

More laughter. But in the question period that followed, the mood instantly got a lot more serious when an elderly woman asked him what he was going to do about the illegal immigrants “who are trying to take over” Iowa and do her personal harm.

In the past, some prominent border-state Republicans — Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and John McCain, for example — have been sympathetic to the problems of illegal immigrants, and while Arkansas is not technically a border state, Huckabee shares that sensibility.

“Most of the immigrants I know are not coming here to commit crimes, but to find a better life,” Huckabee told the woman. “If I was an immigrant, I would want to come here.”

Which is not what the woman wanted to hear. Both Romney and Tancredo talk very tough on illegal immigration and that is a popular position among Iowa Republicans. Huckabee is sticking to his guns, but he does emphasize border security these days.

“I am mad at Congress for not building better fences,” he told the woman. “Why should it be harder for me to get on a plane in Arkansas than to cross an international border?”

After his talk, I interviewed Huckabee and asked him if he is frustrated by what I see as a problem for him: As a personable, pro-life, Southerner with genuine conservative credentials, he would make a good running mate for any of the top-tier Republicans.

“The only reason people talk about me for vice president instead of president is because of money,” he said. “Add money to my campaign, and I am a top presidential contender. It is like Kool-Aid: All you have to do is add water. Well, just add money to my campaign and I am ready to go. And Ames will provide the momentum.”

Huckabee has said he wants to finish in the top three at Ames, but he made clear to me he would have to finish close to the winner to stay in the race. “I think there will be some winnowing out after Ames,” he said.

There has been in the past, but there have never been this many debates on the Republican side before — and some weak candidates could stay in after Ames just to attend debates and get publicity.

Not Huckabee, though.

“Some will stay in to promote an issue and they have a right, but it muddies up the waters,” Huckabee said. “Some will stay in not to get to the White House, but to keep their message alive. Not me.”

Huckabee does have a message, however, and one not often heard from Republicans: He bashes fat cats and talks about “unbridled greed.”

“I am not interested in being the candidate of Wall Street but of Main Street,” he said. “Wealthy CEOs get paid 500 times what the average worker does, but they are not necessarily 500 times smarter or harder working and that is wrong.”

Huckabee grew up in tiny Hope, Ark., home of giant watermelons and Bill Clinton. And, like Clinton, Huckabee often talks about his upbringing.

“My dad never finished high school,” Huckabee said. “He was fireman and on his days off he worked in a generator shop. The work of the day was always on his hands. The only soap we had in the house was Lava. I was in college before I found out it’s not supposed to hurt when you take a shower.”

I asked him if he is still a Baptist minister — many profiles of him say he “was” a Baptist minister — and he replied, “I am one.” Then he added with a smile: “They haven’t defrocked me.”

And has being a minister made him a better candidate?

“I think it is the greatest preparation to run for office or to serve,” he said with real emotion. “There is not a social pathology that I can’t put a name and a face on: A 14-year-old girl who’s pregnant and hasn’t told her parents, I’ve talked to her.

“A young couple head over heels in debt, struggling to keep their marriage together, fighting all the time, I have talked to them.

“An elderly couple where one has Alzheimer’s and the other is struggling over whether to put the spouse in longterm care and it’s just eating them up. I am the guy who sat down and talked to them and worked with them.

“A family deciding to pull the plug on an 18-year-old kid in a motorcycle accident and donate his organs. I am the guy who was there at 2 o’clock in the morning in the ICU to talk to them.”

He leaned forward a little.

“In the very best people I have ever met, there is a secret side that nobody else knows, a dark side that make us all very fragile and human and real,” he said. “And in some of the worst people I have ever encountered I have also found that you can’t completely write them off as unredeemable.”